Sheila Margaret Motton Book Prize Co-Winner, selected by Danielle Legros Georges
Memory
I bruise the way the most secreted,
most tender part of a thigh exposed
purples then blues. No spit-shine shoes,
I’m dirt you can’t wash from your feet.
Wherever you go, know I’m the wind
accosting the trees, the howling night
of your sea. Try to leave me, I’ll pin you
between a rock and a hard place; will hunt you,
even as you erase your tracks
with the tail ends of your skirt. You think
I’m gristle, begging to be chewed?
No, my love: I’m bone. Rather: the sound
bone makes when it snaps. That ditty
lingering in you, like ruin.
Race
You are the original incognito.
Transparent, all things shine through you.
She’s the whitest black girl you ever saw,
lighter than “flesh” in the Crayola box.
But, man, look at that ass and look at her shake it
were just words, not sticks or stones, flung
when dresses were the proof that clung like skin,
when lipstick stained brighter than any blood.
Girl, who is it now you’d want to see you?
And what would that mean: to be seen?
Why not make a blessing of what
all these years you’ve thought a curse?—
you are so everywhere, so nowhere,
in plain sight you walk through walls.
Madwoman as Rasta Medusa
I-woman go turn all a Babylon to stone.
I-woman is the Deliverer and the Truth.
Look pon I and feel yu inside calcify.
Look pon I and witness the chasm,
the abyss of yuself rupture. Look pon I
and know what bring destruction.
Yu say I-woman is monstrosity
but is yu gravalicious ways
mek I come the way I come.
Is yu belief everyone exist fi satisfy
yu wanton wantonness.
Yu think, all these years gone,
I-woman a come here fi revenge.
Wo-yo—but is wrong again yu wrong.
I-woman is the Reckoning and Judgment Day.
This face, etch with wretchedness,
these dreads, writhing and hissing
misery, is not the Terror.
I-woman is what birth from yu Terror.
From Jamaica, Shara McCallum is the author of five books, published in the US and UK, most recently Madwoman, winner of the 2018 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature Poetry Prize and the 2018 Sheila Margaret Motton Book Prize. She is a Liberal Arts Professor of English at Penn State University.